Arts Funding Task Force Turns To Government

As a group of community and cultural leaders works to find an answer to Charlotte's crumbling arts funding system, they're looking to individual donors, corporations and the government.

On Monday, the Cultural Life Task Force heard from city and county administrators, including the budget director of Mecklenburg County. His message: Don’t expect the county to give more.

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The government's hand in arts funding is most evident on Tryon Street. In the last 35 years, some $240 million public dollars have gone into building, renovating and maintaining museums and theaters in Uptown Charlotte. About the same amount of private money has gone into those buildings, too.

The goal all along was an equal partnership between the public and private sectors.

"This worked!" says Arts and Science Council interim-president Robert Bush.

It worked to get the museums and theaters built, yes, but now most of the groups inside them are coming up short of funds to keep themselves operating. And the government's role on that front isn't even close to 50-50.

"Take out all of the facilities and the government is only about $5 million out of $125 million combined budgets of just the major (arts) institutions," says Bush.

The city continues to give about $3 million a year to cultural groups through the Arts and Science Council. Mecklenburg County gives far less. Budget manager Hyong Yi says the county's cultural contribution is primarily through the library and parks systems.

If you're an arts group looking for county money, you better have a really good pitch, says Yi.

"You're competing against mental health, health, poverty, drug rehabilitation, jails, children in schools. . . anybody that has to go up and compete against that, has a very difficult, difficult row to hoe," said Yi to the Cultural Life Task Force meeting Monday.

The task force's recommendations – which are several months away - seem likely to include a call for more public spending on cultural groups themselves, rather than just cultural buildings.

And the task force hasn't even gotten to the really tough discussion – whether raising taxes is part of the solution. That's still to come.

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There’s a group in Charlotte called the Cultural Life Task Force meeting every couple of weeks with a charge to save the city’s cultural sector. The traditional way arts and culture is being funded in the city is no longer working, and as a result, Charlotte’s arts institutions face an uncertain future.

The Arts and Science Council was created decades ago to be the primary fundraiser for Charlotte's cultural sector. But it is no longer the money-raising powerhouse it once was. Cultural institutions that rely on the ASC, are struggling to pay their bills. And that new museum complex Uptown is in the middle of what arts leaders call a "perfect storm."

Blood suckers, slime makers and vomit munchers. Discovery Place has a summertime exhibit sure to grab your kids . . . and probably make you gag. We go inside "Grossology" on the next Charlotte Talks. But first, we sit down with some people on a mission to make sure the city's museums and cultural institutions – like Discovery Place – have stable financial future. Government grants and workplace giving have declined so dramatically in recent years that Charlotte's arts leaders are sounding the alarm. They've formed a task force to come up with solutions. We talk to the co-chairs of that task force, when Charlotte Talks.